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Regarding the Real: Cinema, documentary, and the visual arts

Des O'Rawe

Regarding the real: cinema, documentary, and the visual arts develops an approach to the study of documentary film focussing on its aesthetic and cultural relations to the modern visual arts, ... More

Regarding the real: cinema, documentary, and the visual arts develops an approach to the study of documentary film focussing on its aesthetic and cultural relations to the modern visual arts, especially: animation, assemblage, photography, painting, and architecture. In particular, it examines how documentary practices have often incorporated methods and expressive techniques derived from these art forms. Combining close analysis with cultural history, the book re-assesses the influence of the modern visual arts in subverting the structures of realism typically associated with documentary film, and considers the work of figures whose preferred film language is associative, and fragmentary, and for whom the documentary remains an open form, an unstable expressive phenomenon that at its best interrogates its own narratives, and intentions. In the course of its discussion, the book charts a path that leads from Len Lye to Hiroshi Teshigahara, and includes along the way figures such as Joseph Cornell, Johan van der Keuken, William Klein, Jean-Luc Godard, Jonas Mekas, Raymond Depardon.Less

Julia Margaret Cameron's 'fancy subjects': Photographic allegories of Victorian identity and empire

Jeff Rosen

The Victorians admired Julia Margaret Cameron for her evocative photographic portraits of eminent men like Tennyson, Carlyle, and Darwin. But Cameron also made numerous photographs called ‘fancy ... More

The Victorians admired Julia Margaret Cameron for her evocative photographic portraits of eminent men like Tennyson, Carlyle, and Darwin. But Cameron also made numerous photographs called ‘fancy subjects’ that depicted scenes from literature, personifications from classical mythology, and biblical parables from the Old and New Testament. Julia Margaret Cameron’s ‘fancy subjects’ is the first comprehensive study of these works, examining Cameron’s use of historical allegories and popular iconography to embed moral, intellectual, and political narratives in her photographs. A work of cultural history as much as art history, this book examines cartoons from Punch and line drawings from the Illustrated London News; cabinet photographs and Autotype prints; textiles and wall paper; book illustrations and engravings from period folios, all as a way to contextualize the allegorical subjects that Cameron represented, revealing connections between her ‘fancy subjects’ and popular debates about such topics as biblical interpretation, democratic government, national identity, and colonial expansion.Less

Travelling Images: Looking across the borderlands of art, media and visual culture

Anna Dahlgren

Travelling images critically examines the migrations and transformations of images as they travel between different image communities. It consists of four case studies covering the period 1870–2010 ... More

Travelling images critically examines the migrations and transformations of images as they travel between different image communities. It consists of four case studies covering the period 1870–2010 and includes photocollages, window displays, fashion imagery and contemporary art projects. Through these four close-ups it seeks to reveal the mechanisms, nature and character of these migration processes, and the agents behind them, as well as the sites where they have taken place. The overall aim of this book is thus to understand the mechanisms of interfacing events in the borderlands of the art world. Two key arguments are developed in the book, reflected by its title Travelling images. First, the notion of travel and focus on movements and transformations signal an emphasis on the similarities between cultural artefacts and living beings. The book considers ‘the social biography’ and ‘ecology’ of images, but also, on a more profound level, the biography and ecology of the notion of art. In doing so, it merges perspectives from art history and image studies with media studies. Consequently, it combines a focus on the individual case, typical for art history and material culture studies with a focus on processes and systems, on continuities and ruptures, and alternate histories inspired by media archaeology and cultural historical media studies. Second, the central concept of image is in this book used to designate both visual conventions, patterns or contents and tangible visual images. Thus it simultaneously consider of content and materiality.Less

Watching the red dawn: The American avant-garde and the Soviet Union

Barnaby Haran

Watching the red dawn charts the responses of the American avant-garde to the cultural works of its Soviet counterpart in period from the formation of the USSR in 1922 to recognition of this new ... More

Watching the red dawn charts the responses of the American avant-garde to the cultural works of its Soviet counterpart in period from the formation of the USSR in 1922 to recognition of this new communist nation by USA in 1933. In this period American artists, writers, and designers looked at the emerging Soviet Union with fascination, as they observed this epochal experiment in communism develop out of the chaos of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. They organised exhibitions of Soviet art and culture, reported on visits to Russia in books and articles, and produced works that were inspired by post-revolutionary culture. One of the most important innovations of Soviet culture was to collapse boundaries between disciplines, as part of a general aim to bring art into everyday life. Correspondingly, this book takes an interdisciplinary approach by looking at American avant-garde responses to Soviet culture across several media, including architecture, theatre, film, photography, and literature. As such, Watching the red dawn considers the putative area of ‘American Constructivism’ by examining the interconnected ways in which Constructivist works were influential upon American practices.Less

The Face That Launched a Thousand Lawsuits: The American Women Who Forged a Right to Privacy

Jessica Lake

The advent of the photographic and cinematic camera in the mid to late 19th century caused new harms to individuals (particularly women), which existing laws (copyright, defamation, trespass) were ... More

The advent of the photographic and cinematic camera in the mid to late 19th century caused new harms to individuals (particularly women), which existing laws (copyright, defamation, trespass) were inadequate to address. This book demonstrates that women forged a ‘right to privacy’ in the United States by bringing lawsuits claiming control and ownership over filmed images (still and moving) of their faces, bodies and narratives. At a time when they still lacked civil and political rights, women employed ‘a right to privacy’ to prevent themselves being reduced to nameless ‘pretty’ objects; to protest the transformation of their bodies into spectacles of ‘monstrosity’; to limit their exposure on the big screen to the mass ‘gaze’ of audiences; to control the development of their careers in paid work as models, dancers and actresses; and to reclaim their personal life stories from exploitation by film studios. Case documents also reveal the nexus between privacy claims and arguments by the subjects of images for property rights in them (eventuating in the right to publicity). This book interrogates the gender of privacy law and shows how privacy emerged as an ambiguous claim for women – it both reinforced traditional stereotypes of femininity or womanhood and progressed the feminist aspirations of the New Woman for greater self-determination and self-articulation. It shows that visual crimes against women occurring today via the Internet, such as revenge pornography or non-consensual pornography, have an important legal, social and political history.Less

A Communion of Shadows: Religion and Photography in Nineteenth-Century America

Rachel McBride Lindsey

When the revolutionary technology of photography erupted in American culture in 1839, it swiftly became, in the day’s parlance, a “mania.” This richly illustrated book positions vernacular ... More

When the revolutionary technology of photography erupted in American culture in 1839, it swiftly became, in the day’s parlance, a “mania.” This richly illustrated book positions vernacular photography at the center of the study of nineteenth-century American religious life. As an empirical tool, photography captured many of the signal scenes of American life, from the gold rush to the bloody battlefields of the Civil War. But photographs did not simply display neutral records of people, places, and things; rather, commonplace photographs became inscribed with spiritual meaning, disclosing, not merely signifying, a power that lay beyond. Rachel McBride Lindsey demonstrates that what people beheld when they looked at a photograph had as much to do with what lay outside the frame--theological expectations, for example--as with what the camera had recorded. Whether studio portraits tucked into Bibles, postmortem portraits with locks of hair attached, “spirit” photography, stereographs of the Holy Land, or magic lanterns used in biblical instruction, photographs were curated, beheld, displayed, and valued as physical artifacts that functioned both as relics and as icons of religious practice. Lindsey’s interpretation of “vernacular” as an analytic introduces a way to consider anew the cultural, social, and material reach of religion.Less

Bergson and the Art of Immanence: Painting, Photography, Film

Charlotte de Mille

John Mullarkey (ed.)

Bergson and The Art of Immanence is the first book to bring Henri Bergson’s philosophy of immanence together with the latest ideas in art-theory and the practice of immanent art as found in painting, ... More

Bergson and The Art of Immanence is the first book to bring Henri Bergson’s philosophy of immanence together with the latest ideas in art-theory and the practice of immanent art as found in painting, photography, and film. This new collection of essays from world-renowned art theorists, philosophers, and Bergson-scholars will provide both a wide historical context and a rigorous conceptual framework for contemporary art-theory and practice involving the concepts of rhythmic duration, perception, affectivity, the body, memory, and intuition – all of which were given their first systematic theorization in the twentieth-century as immanent objects through the work of Bergson.Less

Knowledge is Pleasure: Florence Ayscough in Shanghai

Lindsay Shen

Knowledge is Pleasure is the biography of Florence Ayscough, one of the most respected interpreters of Chinese culture of the early 20th century. Born in Concession-era Shanghai, Ayscough developed ... More

Knowledge is Pleasure is the biography of Florence Ayscough, one of the most respected interpreters of Chinese culture of the early 20th century. Born in Concession-era Shanghai, Ayscough developed into an accomplished translator of Chinese poetry, art curator, critic, gardener and photographer. She played an important role in introducing western museums and collectors to Chinese Modernist painting. The author draws on Ayscough’s diaries, private correspondence and published writings to bring to life a woman of great intellectual vibrancy and cultural curiosity.Less

Representing Ethnicity in Contemporary French Visual Culture

Joseph McGonagle

The issue of ethnicity in France, and how ethnicities are represented there visually, remains one of the most important and polemical aspects of French post-colonial politics and society. This is the ... More

The issue of ethnicity in France, and how ethnicities are represented there visually, remains one of the most important and polemical aspects of French post-colonial politics and society. This is the first book to analyse how a range of different ethnicities have been represented across contemporary French visual culture. Via a wide series of case studies – from the worldwide hit film Amélie to France’s popular TV series Plus belle la vie – it probes how ethnicities have been represented across different media, including film, photography, television and the visual arts. Four chapters examine distinct areas of particular importance: national identity, people of Algerian heritage, Jewishness and France’s second city Marseille.Less

Benjamin's Passages: Dreaming, Awakening

Alexander Gelley

In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to the collective, Walter Benjamin projected a “macroscosmic journey” of the individual sleeper to “the dreaming collective, which, ... More

In transposing the Freudian dream work from the individual subject to the collective, Walter Benjamin projected a “macroscosmic journey” of the individual sleeper to “the dreaming collective, which, through the arcades, communes with its own insides.” This book examines the figurative status of sleeping and awakening within the allegorical structure of The Arcades Project and in Benjamin’s thought more broadly. For Benjamin, memory is not antiquarian: it functions as a solicitation, a call to a collectivity to come. The motif of awakening involves a qualified but crucial performative intention that was central to Benjamin’s undertaking. Benjamin’s passages are not just the Paris arcades: they refer also to Benjamin’s effort to negotiate the labyrinth of his writings. In tracing these corridors of thought, the book treats many of Benjamin’s most important works and examines important critical questions: the interplay of aesthetics and politics, the genre of The Arcades Project, citation, language, messianism, aura and image, and the motifs of memory, the crowd, and awakening.Less

Ephemeral Histories: Public Art, Politics, and the Struggle for the Streets in Chile

Camilo D. Trumper

Ephemeral Histories: Public Art, Politics and the Struggle for the Street in Chile is a cultural history of the street in Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende, the hemisphere’s first ... More

Ephemeral Histories: Public Art, Politics and the Struggle for the Street in Chile is a cultural history of the street in Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende, the hemisphere’s first democratically elected Socialist president. Santiago became a contested political arena during Allende’s 1000 days in power. Residents across the political spectrum engaged in a heated battle to claim public space and challenge the terms and limits of political contest. Santiaguinos occupied public spaces in ways that appear fleeting, ephemeral, or mundane, but that challenged the sites and forms of legitimate political debate in Chile. Ephemeral Histories studies the tactics of political conflict— marches and protest, posters and murals, and documentary film and street photography—and sheds light on the contours of a public sphere of political debate rooted in urban practice. Street art, for instance, was both vehicle and window into a wider attempt to claim public spaces as a means of reimaging political citizenship. Graffiti, posters and murals might last an hour or a day before they were torn down or painted over, but they allowed a wide range of urban residents to redefine how and where politics was done and debated, and to reimagine the very mode of legitimate political debate in democracy and again in dictatorship. In fact, santiaguinos turned again to ephemeral political practices to rebuild political networks and reestablish political debate after the bloody military coup that deposed Allende on September 11, 1973. Placing urban and visual culture at the center of a story of political change over time, Ephemeral Histories traces the connections and continuities in political citizenship and practice in democracy and dictatorship. It suggests that the regime’s violence did not represent a clean rupture with the past, but a brutal engagement with the history of urban politics under Allende.Less

Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis: Lyrical Representations of Photographs from the 19th Century to the Present

Andrew Miller

Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis is a detailed study of the ekphrasis of photography in poetry since the 19th century. Unlike other critical studies of ekphrasis, Miller’s study concentrates solely on ... More

Poetry, Photography, Ekphrasis is a detailed study of the ekphrasis of photography in poetry since the 19th century. Unlike other critical studies of ekphrasis, Miller’s study concentrates solely on the lyrical ekphrasis of photographs, setting out to define how the photographic image provides a unique form of poetic ekphrasis. Moving between the disciplines of semiotics, visual studies, psychology, classical rhetoric, philosophy and literary criticism, Miller outlines what he defines as the chronotope of the photograph. Employing M.M. Bakhtin’s notion of the literary chronotope, Miller argues that the ekphrasis of photographs manifests itself in a series of chronotopic narratives. Each chapter of the book is dedicated to delineating one of these narratives. In this work, Miller engages in a literary history that follows the timeline of photography from its origins in the 19th century to its contemporary digital manifestations in the 21st. The study engages in close-readings of the works of such poets as Walt Whitman, Lewis Carroll, Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, Marianne Moore and Philip Larkin. In addition, the book does the work of a comparative study, and it goes beyond the limits of Anglophone literature to include the works of such poets and writers as Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, Bertolt Brecht, Ernesto Cardenal and Zbigniew Herbert.Less

Awakening the Eye: Robert Frank's American Cinema

George Kouvaros

As the first book-length study of Robert Frank’s work in film and video, Awakening the Eye provides a new account of the career of one of America’s most important twentieth-century artists. Keeping ... More

As the first book-length study of Robert Frank’s work in film and video, Awakening the Eye provides a new account of the career of one of America’s most important twentieth-century artists. Keeping the dual nature of Frank’s career as a photographer-filmmaker in mind, each of the chapters pays particular attention to those instances when ideas and ways of working developed in one media leave their mark on another. By examining Frank’s films in the context of his more widely recognized photographic work, this study stands as a model of cross-media history in which film and photography are viewed not as divergent fields, but as complicit in their search for new forms of visual expression. Awakening the Eye is about the intricate material negotiations that define Frank’s engagement with photography, film and writing; it is also about the artist’s determination to forge a revealing and highly personal connection between the events and circumstances of his life and the material qualities of his work.Less

Agitating Images: Photography against History in Indigenous Siberia

Craig Campbell

Agitating Images explores the early history of Communist organization among small dispersed groups of indigenous Evenki peoples of Central Siberia. It draws this history into an examination of the ... More

Agitating Images explores the early history of Communist organization among small dispersed groups of indigenous Evenki peoples of Central Siberia. It draws this history into an examination of the destabilizing role of photographs in the production of history. While documenting the development of Soviet Nationalities policy in context of people who were considered to be socially and technologically ‘backwards,’ the project is resolutely committed to the demonstration of what I call photographic agitation. It performs this agitation all the while presenting a ‘nervous’ history of the momentous encounter between Soviet socialism and indigenous peoples in the Siberian North. This book will have broad appeal. Not only is it the first book to present a comprehensive treatment of the remote soviet outpost called the Culture Base but it adds to a lively historical and ethnological discourse on the colonial experience of the indigenous minorities of the Siberian North. Scholars working on histories of soviet socialism will be interested in this book for its counter-narrative of socialist modernity. For scholars interested in photography’s colonial histories, Agitating Images demonstrates the muddy role of photography in producing coherent scopic regimes.Less

Dead Matter: The Meaning of Iconic Corpses

Margaret Schwartz

An Iconography of the Flesh theorizes the relationship between the body and the image by looking at the corpse as a special instance of a body that is both thing and representation. Unlike ... More

An Iconography of the Flesh theorizes the relationship between the body and the image by looking at the corpse as a special instance of a body that is both thing and representation. Unlike sociological or anthropological studies of death and funerary practice, this work takes as its starting point the special role of the photograph in modern mourning practices, particularly those surrounding public figures. Arguing that the evolving cultural understanding of photographic realism structures our relationship to the corpse, the book outlines a new politics of representation in which some bodies are more visible (and vulnerable) in death than others. An Iconography of the Flesh ultimately argues that death without a body is specific to the capitalist mode of social reproduction and its attendant alienation of meaningful representations of death in favor of ghostly figures of bare life that reflect the exploitation of those whose bodies are considered expendable.Less